Investigating married adults’ communal coping with genetic health risk and perceived discrimination

ABSTRACT

Increased genetic testing in personalized medicine presents unique challenges for couples, including managing disease risk and potential discrimination as a couple. This study investigated couples’ conflicts and support gaps as they coped with perceived genetic discrimination. We also explored the degree to which communal coping was beneficial in reducing support gaps and ultimately stress. Dyadic analysis of married adults (N = 266, 133 couples), in which one person had the genetic risk for serious illness, showed that perceived discrimination predicted more frequent conflicts about alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency-related treatment, privacy boundaries, and finances, which, in turn, predicted wider gaps in emotion and esteem support, and greater stress for both spouses. Communal coping predicted lower support gaps for both partners and marginally lower stress.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• communal coping
• personalized medicine
• discrimination
• social support
• genetics

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the members of the Alpha-1 Research Registry and their spouses for sharing their thoughts with us. We thank Roxanne Parrott, Anne Merrill, Mary Poss, Amber Worthington, and Amanda Applegate for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Rachel A. Smith (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University.

Alan Sillars (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Montana.

Ryan P. Chesnut (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is a research and evaluation scientist at the Clearinghouse for Military Family Readiness at the Pennsylvania State University.

Xun Zhu (M.A., Michigan State University) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University.

ORCID

Rachel A. Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2407-7515

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R21HG007111 and by the National Institute on Drug Abuse under Award Number P50-DA010075-16. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.